Britain’s beleaguered Royal Institution is once again under scrutiny for its finances. The Guardian reports that the venerable institution has violated charity law when leasing office space to a senior board member.

The Royal Institution has survived since 1799 and is Britain’s oldest independent scientific research organization. Its laboratories have been home to famous scientists such as Lawrence Brag and Michael Faraday, and more recently it has been known for its beloved “Christmas lectures”, which are broadcast to science enthusiasts around the country.

But the RI has had its fair share of financial troubles this century. In 2006 it brought in Susan Greenfield, a prominent and at times controversial Oxford neuroscientist, to give it a facelift. Greenfield undertook a £22 million refurbishment of the RI’s central London headquarters.

The new headquarters building looks great, but late last year it emerged that the RI had struggled to finance it. To pay for the works, the RI sold off several downtown properties and dipped into restricted endowment funds.

The fun came to an end last autumn when the Charities Commission, which oversees UK non-profits, caught wind of the unauthorized use of the endowment money. Members of the board voted to oust Greenfield in December, and she is now suing the RI for sexual discrimination.

Meanwhile it seems that the problems at the RI run deeper than Greenfield’s renovations. The latest article reports that the Charities Commission is now actively investigating the RI for leasing some of its office space to the company of Adrian de Ferranti, who chairs the RI’s board. Not reporting such a lease for approval by the commission is a violation of a 1993 charity law in the UK.

It’s unclear what the fallout from the latest missteps will be. The RI’s chief executive, Chris Rofe, is quoted by the Guardian as saying that the RI is “in the process of clarifying the information required to enable us to fully comply”.

Image: photograph of the RI by Matt From London via Flickr under Creative Commons.

Speaking before a crowd of supporters in Tehran’s Azadi Square, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced today that his nation had enriched some of its uranium to 20% uranium-235 — a significant step towards developing a nuclear weapon.

The announcement came on the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. It was delivered at a time when the current government faces a revolution of its own — claims of widespread vote rigging in last June’s general election has sent thousands of Iranians to the streets in protest.

Ahmadinejad’s statement may have been designed to strike a populist chord. Iran’s nuclear programme is overwhelmingly popular with its citizens, who view it as a sign of the nation’s scientific skill.

If true, then 20% would be a significant, though not decisive, step forward in Iran’s enrichment capability. Iran has already enriched some 1,200 kilogrammes of uranium ore from its natural level of 0.72% U-235 to around 3.5%. The first steps of enrichment are the most difficult, and getting to 3.5% represents around two-thirds of the total work needed to produce a nuclear weapon. Material for nuclear bombs generally needs to be around 90% pure.

Twenty percent would presumably get Iran much closer to a nuclear bomb. It would also allow it to gain experience in dealing with problems that can arise in later stages of enrichment (air and water inside the centrifuges can create problems at these higher levels).

The best overall analysis out there may well be from the Institute for Science and International Security, a think tank run by former IAEA nuclear inspector David Albright. Albright has some great briefing sheets on the Tehran Research Reactor, an American built 5 megawatt reactor where the 20%-enriched fuel is supposedly destined to be burned.

The ISIS report also makes what I think is a compelling case that what Iran is working towards is a “breakout capability” — that is an ability to produce a bomb very quickly in the event of war.

Ahmadinejad’s own statements seem to support that view. The New York Times reports that he appeared to address the West at one point in his address saying that "we do not believe in manufacturing a bomb. Then he added: “if one day we wanted to build nuclear bombs we would announce it publicly without being afraid of you”.

There’s plenty of press today about the National Ignition Facility (NIF), an ambitious project to drive fusion energy using a massive array of super-powerful lasers. If this sounds like some sort of devious James Bond plot, you’re not too far off: NIF’s primary job is to verify that the United State’s nuclear stockpile is working well.

But there’s also hope it could advance the cause of fusion power. NIF will fire 192 lasers onto a tiny capsule of hydrogen isotopes (deuterium and tritium). Scientists hope that the pressure exerted by all that laser light will cause the nuclei to fuse together, creating helium and a lot of energy.

This week, NIF announced a milestone: it successfully focused 0.7 megajoules of energy onto a test capsule. To hear some news outlets report it, you’d think this was the end of the quest for fusion energy. But scientists still must double the energy of the lasers and insert a deuterium-tritium fuel pellet into the machine before they can trigger a full fusion “burn”. Even then, it would be a long way from that to a fusion power-plant.

Even then there’s uncertainty: Nobody’s exactly sure whether NIF can concentrate its energy tightly enough. And if it can, contaminants from the capsule wall could disrupt the fusion process.

A couple of fusion researchers I spoke to about the NIF announcement were optimistic, calling it “very encouraging”. But for the most part they’ve still got their arms crossed—they’ll have to see higher energies and actual fuel in the machine before they’re convinced this US$3.5 billion gamble works as advertised.

If you’d like to learn more, I’d point you to the competition: Science’s Dan Clery has done a better job than most laying out what the milestone means, and what lies ahead.

Image: LLNL

The parasite that causes the most severe form of malaria is circulating in gorillas, according to a new study contributed to PNAS by Academy member Francisco Ayala of the University of California, in Irvine. Scientists previously thought only humans carried this deadly form of malaria (press release).

Ayala and his team analyzed gorilla poop and found DNA evidence of Plasmodium falciparum — the malaria that causes almost all deaths from the disease — in two gorilla subspecies. They also found the parasite in blood samples taken from a wild born “pet” gorilla in Gabon. (BBC)

Chimps and gorillas were known to carry a parasite closely related to Plasmodium falciparum, called Plasmodium reichenowi, but these parasites were thought to have coevolved with their hosts over the past 5 million years or so and be unable to infect the other apes. Some of the early evidence supporting this hypothesis appears to come from a rather ghastly study in 1939, in which blood from P. reichenowi-infected chimpanzees was injected into humans, and blood from P.falciparum-infected humans was injected into chimps, resulting in neither suffering from an infection.

The new findings suggest that human malignant malaria does indeed infect gorillas, although they don’t appear to be ill, perhaps due to their long exposure to P. reichenowi. Nevertheless, mosquitoes sucking their blood may pass the parasites to the next host — and as deforestation and habitat destruction in sub-Saharan Africa barrel along, the authors point out, that host is increasingly likely to be a human.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

The mysterious link between the mysterious disease known as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and the mysterious new virus called XMRV just got more mysterious (BBC).

XMRV was discovered by an American group in 2006 during a search for viruses linked to prostate cancer. Then, this October, another American group published in Science a strong correlation between CFS and infection with XMRV — 67% of CFS patients were infected with the virus, compared to 3.7% of controls. The paper made a big splash not only because it’s exceptional to find a correlation of 67% between a virus — or any infectious agent — and a chronic disease, but also because apparently about 4% of the healthy American population is walking around with this curious virus lurking around in their bodies. Despite these links, there is no evidence that XMRV causes either of these diseases.

But the link is completely missing on the other side of the pond. Researchers in Germany and in Ireland had a tough time finding a correlation between XMRV and prostate cancer, and now a group of UK scientists are reporting in PLoS-ONE that none of the CFS patients they tested carry the virus. The team boldly asserts they are “’one thousand per cent’ confident in their result” (Daily Mail).

There are a few possibilities to explain this discrepancy.

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US researchers have used nanosensors to spot early signs of cancer in unprocessed rat blood.

Nanosensors are already used to detect biomarkers like prostate-specific antigen (PSA), a protein that becomes elevated in men with prostate cancer, but these only work with purified solutions — not real body fluids. The purification process and chemical analysis can take days.

The new “Star Trek-style gadget”, as the Telegraph likes to call it, is an all-in-one filter plus detector that works in minutes, the researchers report in Nature Nanotechnology.

They injected biomarker-spiked rat blood into the device, captured the biomarkers, washed out gunk such as proteins and salts, and released the antigens into an elixir that flows over a nanosensor-covered chip. The group was able to detect PSA and the breast cancer biomarker carbohydrate antigen 15.3 (CA15.3) on the order of picograms per millilitre with 10% accuracy, which doesn’t sound very accurate but is a bit like finding a grain of sugar in a pool filled with Jell-O.

The chip still hasn’t made it out of the lab, but if it does the authors think it will be cheap enough to use in the clinic, rather than external labs (Press release)

More coverage

‘Nanosensors’ spot early signs of cancer – US News (Health Day)

Nanomaterial used in cancer tests, medicine delivery – AFP

Image credit: Flickr/<a href=https://www.flickr.com/photos/kthrn/2119663328/ target=_blank>kthrn

Partial bone marrow transplants may cure sickle cell disease in adults, researchers at the US National Institutes of Health report in the New England Journal of Medicine. (US News)

Sickle cell disease is an inherited condition in which some red blood cells take on a “sickle” shape that can clog up blood vessels, causing pain, organ failure and strokes. Symptoms can be treated with blood transfusions and drugs, but these have side effects and don’t always work.

The only curative treatment is a bone marrow transplant that replaces the blood stem cells, but this has only been performed in children, as clinicians thought adult patients’ bodies would have been too ravaged by the disease to survive a bone marrow transplant — which includes chemotherapy, radiation and drugs that suppress the immune system.

By taking the transplantation down a few notches — low-dose radiation, a different immunosuppressant drug and no chemotherapy — the researchers were able to pull off successful transplantations in 9 out of 10 patients, aged 16 to 45. The less intense procedure left some of the patients’ own faulty bone marrow intact, but there was enough room for donor cells to fill in that symptoms of the disease were gone in the 9 patients with successful grafts, at least for the duration of the 30-month study. All 10 patients are still alive and have not developed graft-versus-host disease, although some of them remain on immunosuppressants. (Reuters)

Image: NIH.gov

One of the most important brains in the history of neuroscience is being sliced up on live streaming video, as Nature reported last week.

Jacopo Annese of the University of California, San Diego, was the lucky anatomist who scored the precious brain of Henry Molaison, known as H.M., who died on 2 December 2008. Molaison lost his ability to form new memories after a hunk of his hippocampus was removed during a surgical procedure in 1953; the hundreds of cognitive studies that followed have revealed the role of the hippocampus in memory formation and the relationship between brain structure and function.

Annese decided to commemorate the anniversary of Molaison’s death by cutting up his brain into about 2,500 70-micrometre slices on a live webcast. Other scientists can use the slices to follow up on previous studies on H.M. The streaming video is pretty mesmerizing — even for someone with a bitter relationship with microtomes.

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A recently-retired atmospheric scientist at NASA has been fined $10,000 and sentenced to one year’s probation for directing tens of thousands of dollars in NASA contracts to his wife’s company (Washington Examiner).

Mark Schoeberl was chief scientist for NASA’s Earth Sciences Division, and, according to the right-leaning Examiner’s lead, “one of the scientific world’s most cited authorities on the human effect on Earth’s atmosphere”. He retired on 17 September from the agency, and two weeks later pled guilty to steering no-bid contracts to his wife’s firm, Animated Earth LLC. In 2007, his financial disclosure form omitted any interest in the company, even though it earned $50,000-plus that year in NASA contracts.

Between 2006 and 2008, NASA awarded more than $190,000 to Animated Earth without competition, although prosecutors said the government didn’t end up losing money because the company completed the contracted work (GovExec.com).

The relationship between Schoeberl and Animated Earth, which develops plasma-screen kiosks with near real-time satellite images of Earth’s atmosphere, was well-known at NASA. More than 50 scientists submitted letters to the court praising Schoeberl’s character and credentials, and three addressed the court to request leniency (GovExec.com).

Image: NASA.gov

The Smithsonian Institute is throwing a four-day party to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Antarctic Treaty. The summit includes talks by leading Antarctic researchers like ozone hole pioneer Susan Solomon, US science czar John Holdren and Prince Albert II of Monaco, the most recent country to sign the treaty.

The treaty was signed in 1959 as countries bumped heads over how to divide the continent, turning Antarctica into a zone of peace and establishing it as the world’s largest conservation area. The treaty now has 47 signatories and is often viewed as shining example of international collaboration.

But a lot can happen in 50 years, including global warming, eco-tourism and worldwide craving for oil and fish, and the treaty system is trying to make sure scientific research and other activities are aligned with environmental issues on the tundra. The original treaty made hardly any mention of the environment.

To deal with these modern problems, the signatories agreed to establish the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), which went into force in 1982. Then in 1991 a new environmental agreement was signed, which prohibited any mining indefinitely and established the Committee for Environmental Protection (CEP) to advise the treaty members on environmental issues.

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